Opening-Shot Eyeball of the Day: Sun's! She's tending to some kind of flower on the beach while, out in the shallows, Jin catches a fish with his bare hands. First we've got a hobbit on the island, and now he's joined by Gollum.
Sun's listening in on a conversation between Jack and Kate, conducted as they load backpacks full of empty water bottles. Kate still wants to know what Jack was doing out on his vision quest or whatever, and Jack doesn't want to tell her. She tells him that his tattoos don't seem to jibe with the steadfast doctor she thinks he is. "Are you one of those hardcore spinal surgeons?" she asks playfully. Charlie interrupts to tell them that if they're finished "verbally copulating," they should get moving -- everyone needs water, and Locke, who's shown shaving with one of the smaller of his 400 knives, wants to get going. As they hike off, Kate tells Charlie to ask Jack about his tattoos. "Oh," replies Charlie, "you guys have an inside joke. How absolutely wonderful for you both." Dominic Monaghan is good at taking lines that are only barely jokes and turning them funny. Also, Evangeline Lilly looks so much better smiling than she does sad and pensive. Alas, she won't get many more chances to smile this episode, or probably ever.
Back to Sun and Jin. Still holding the flower, she sees him bash the fish (so juicy sweet!) against a piece of fuselage. The score starts to incorporate some high-pitched flutes so that we know we're about to focus on the Asians. Sun gives the ol' Thousand-Yard Stare of Impending Flashback and...
…we're at some kind of elegant evening party, complete with string quartet playing in the background. There will be many flashbacks in this episode to Sun's and Jin's past, but it's never made clear where they live. North Korea? South Korea? Sydney? Somewhere else? Adding to the confusion is the fact that the scenes meant to be set at Sun's father's house seem to have been shot at the distinctly Japanese Byodo-In in O'ahu's Valley of the Temples. Let's just say for now that Sun and Jin appear to live in Koreastralia. I myself have spent some quality time at Byodo-In, which is lovely; the pools around the gardens are filled with koi, who have been fed fish food so often by tourists (it's available for a couple bucks a bag) that they crowd the water underneath the bridges and, when you throw some food in, churn the water into a scary froth of scales and wide-open gullets. Plus, if you've been wishing you could feel like Snow White, you can hold your hand out with a tiny bit of fish food and watch sparrows flit onto your fingers to pluck the pellets away. Anyways, Sun is chatting with a group of friends, who all disappear instantly when a passing waiter offers subtitled champagne. The waiter, in full waiter regalia, is Jin. He gives her a sly look as
he serves other partygoers.
Later that night, Sun is sitting by herself in a candlelit pagoda, staring out at the water. Below her, unseen to us, thousands of blind koi, driven mad by hunger, amass, ready to attack. Luckily for Sun, Jin comes by and the nefarious plans of the koi are thwarted...for now. I feel a special affinity for koi because they're one of the primary results that come up when I Google my actual last name, Kois. A recent such search yielded:
1. A few pages having to do with my own writing or performing.
2. Endless pages about koi ponds, koi gardens, and koi care supplies.
3. The website of the Korean Overseas Information Service, an organization devoted to disseminating information about Korea and Koreans around the world.
4. Pages referring to Kois v. Wisconsin, the obscenity case my Uncle John successfully fought all the way to the Supreme Court in 1972.
5. The unbelievably awesome German rock band Kois Revenge. "Daneben haben wir auch Spass daran, Klassiker wie zum Beispiel Puff the magic dragon, My heart will go on, Jumpin' Jack Flash zu covern, sie unserem Sound anzupassen."
6. My Internet double, Dan Kois of Concordia University in Nebraska, whose sweet girlfriend (or psycho ex-girlfriend) Lydia used part of her web page to discuss how awesome he is. I think they both graduated a long time ago. The other Dan Kois used to run his college's branch of Campus Clowns for Christ.
I feel sorry for people with common last names, like my attractive lawyer wife or my friend Denny who speaks Korean. Common last names make self-Googling impractical. I choose to ignore, of course, the fact that self-Googling is perhaps the most narcissistic thing a person can do that doesn't involve actually humping a mirror.
Jesus Christ, 800 words and I'm only four minutes into the episode. Time to get cracking. Jin approaches Sun in the pagoda and gives her a sneaky kiss. She smiles and pulls away a bit, looking around for her father. "He's busy being a host," Jin replies. Sun tells him she wants to go away to America with him; Jin replies that he loves Sun, but doesn't want to elope with her. "Your father would never allow it," he adds, failing to understand the entire concept of eloping. Jin says he will ask Sun's father for her hand in marriage, but Sun thinks it'll never work. "You don't know my father," she protests. Jin produces a pretty white flower, apparently from midair, and says, "I know me." Sun sniffs the flower and says it's beautiful; Jin wishes it were a diamond. To be fair, a diamond would not smell nearly as good. They kiss. Sun looks very pretty in this scene in a pink dress. Jin looks like a monkey in his waiter outfit.
Midsection Beach. Sun looks up from her reverie to see an angry-looking Jin heading down toward the water. He's looking at Mercutio and Walt, who are hanging out by the surf. As Sun calls out, "What's the matter?" Jin charges Mercutio and lays some wicked fucking wood on him, like a linebacker-quality tackle. As Mercutio protests, Jin throws him onto his back and starts punching him. Slow motion reveals that in about half the shots of this fight, the continuity people failed to put the watch that we'll later find out is the cause of this whole thing on the stuntman's wrist. Walt leaps at Jin, who pushes him away. Then for a solid twenty seconds, Jin punches Mercutio and shoves his head underwater while not one of the ten nearby castaways rushes in to break it up. They're all waiting for someone with a speaking role to do something. Meanwhile, Sun screams in Korean and Walt screams in English. Walt's screaming the usual -- "Get off him," "Stop it," "He never did anything to you except stare at your wife's naked breasts for like an hour" -- while Sun, according to my friend Denny who speaks Korean, screams, "Jin! No! You are taking our discussion of an S&M threesome with [Mercutio] too far! Surely he has used the safe word by now! The safe word is 'ow'!"
After the commercials, Sayid and Sawyer come running to Mercutio's aid. Sayid lays another vicious hit on Jin. Were this a football game, that hit would have forced a fumble. A fumble in the jungle! I have to say, other than the glitch with the watch, this is a fantastically-shot fight scene. Splashy and messy and cool. Sayid puts some kind of a wrestling or law-enforcement neck hold on Jin and asks Sawyer for the handcuffs. Funnily enough, Sawyer has them waiting in his pocket. They handcuff Jin to a kind of pipe connected to the landing gear and Sayid asks Sun, "What happened?" She stares stonily back at him.
The Aqua Teen Thirst Force tromps through the jungle. Kate asks Jack how he found the water, and he says, "Luck." Locke looks back the way they came and seems to hear Sun screaming on the beach. When they reach the spring, Locke says the place is "amazing." By day, I think it looks kind of like Hef's Grotto. Charlie asks if they should look through the auxiliary wreckage for supplies, and seems pleased when Locke suggests he's got a point. Jack agrees and takes their water bottles, telling Charlie to keep an eye out for drugs. "Drugs," Charlie says. Yes, drugs. "Drugs," Charlie says. Yes, drugs. "Drugs," Charlie says. Yes, drugs. "Drugs," Charlie says. Yes, drugs. "Drugs," Charlie says. Yes, drugs. "Drugs," Charlie says. Yes, drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs...the echoes float through the jungle like anvils in the night.
Charlie steps away and secrets himself at the base of a tree, digging his packet of heroin from his pocket. There's not very much of it left. He's about to take a toot when Locke shows up and says, "Don't move." Charlie hides the baggie and tries to explain himself, but as Jack and Kate show up, Locke points out that Charlie's standing on a beehive. If he moves, Locke says, the hive will split. He sends Jack and Kate off to get something to cover up the hive while a very nervous-looking Charlie admits to an irrational fear of bees. Don't worry, Charlie, I have one too, stemming from the time that I was a little kid reading a book and eating a sandwich by an open kitchen window and, just when I was about to take a big bite out of the sandwich, looked down to see two gigantic wasps crawling around on it. This may have had something to do, of course, with the fact that I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich, a delicacy that, looking back, I can't believe my mother fed to an already hyperactive kid. Oh my God, a PB&H sounds really good. I'm gonna go make one right now.
Mmphkay, M'm mmack. Mmere mmas M? Moh meah. I checked, and that sandwich I just ate had 38 grams of sugar in it. Basically,
it was a Bear Claw between two pieces of bread. Also, it tastes less good when you're 29 than it does when you're 10. Anyhoodle, back on the beach, Mercutio reiterates that he didn't do anything to inspire Jin's attack. Jin angrily shouts something, translated by my friend Denny, who speaks Korean, as "These handcuffs are hott!" It turns out that in Korean, just as in English, there's a difference between the words for "hot" and "hott." Sayid insists, "Surely there must be something you're not telling us?" Surely every screenwriter must know by now that to have a character start a sentence with "surely" is to inspire the irrational expectation in audiences that another character will respond, "Don't call me Shirley"? Mercutio asks Sayid where he's from, and Sayid says, "Tikrit." Interesting. Home of Saddam, right? "Iraq," he clarifies. Mercutio shouts that in the U.S., Korean people don't like black people. Walt gives an angry look at Jin and Sun. Sun points at her wrist, referring, we'll find out later, to Mercutio's wristwatch, but everyone thinks she's asking to have Jin's cuffs removed. Sayid yells that the cuffs stay on. Sawyer cracks, "A little louder, Omar, maybe she'll understand you." Hurley obliviously keeps referring to Jin as "the Chinese dude" and points out he won't last long in the sun. Sayid says the cuffs stay on until they figure out why Jin did what he did.
Flashback to Koreastralia. A long-haired Sun stands on a bridge at the Valley of the Temples, looking down at the massing koi below. A downcast Jin approaches; Sun asks how the conversation with her father went. Jin grins and tells her that her father gave permission. She throws her arms around him and shrieks happily. Jin adds that he will have to take a year of management training and work in her father's factory as well. Sun looks skeptical about the deal, but seems much happier when Jin produces a diamond ring. They embrace, Sun staring at the ring on her finger.
Charlie's still standing on the beehive. Hey, what kind of bees are these? I'd say bumble. Bumble in the jungle! Jack's got a bag to cover the hive with, but Charlie's busy freaking out. "This is the most crap idea ever," he cries. Just as Jack's about to cover the hive, Charlie gets stung on the face and, slapping at it, steps forward and splits the hive. Dangerous CGI bees fly everywhere. Locke and Charlie tumble in the jungle in one direction, while Kate and Jack run back to the Grotto, swatting all the way. They strip off their bee-filled shirts; Kate edges into a cave, where she's extremely surprised to find a desiccated corpse.
Commercials. I'm gonna declare it right now: The Incredibles is gonna be the greatest movie ever made in the history of the world.
Back in the cave, Jack inspects the two corpses, noting that they seem to have been laid to rest there. "Where'd they come from?" Kate asks. Jack notes that they shot a polar bear recently. "Where'd that come from?" Heh. He also speculates that the bodies are 40 to 50 years old, because in addition to being a doctor and an amateur pilot, Jack's also a forensic investigator. He pulls a little cloth bag off one of the corpses and shakes a pair of smooth stones, one black and one white, into his hand. He hides the stones as Locke and Charlie show up, Charlie complaining that he was stung "several hundred times." "Oh, and you left this," he adds, handing Kate's shirt to her. "It was full of bees," an embarrassed Kate says. "I'd have thought Cs, actually," Charlie replies, staring at Kate's bra. This line is really, really funny, so much so that it seems out of place, but whatever, I'm not complaining. I did some research, by the way -- grueling research -- and determined that this joke is legit, because unlike dress and shoe sizes, British bra sizes are the same as American. Though the British adopted the sizing system later than us, due to British discretion -- a quality Charlie, curiously, seems to lack. "Bloody hell," he says, seeing the corpses. "These are the people who were here before us?" Jack throws him a look as Locke asks what they're talking about; Locke, of course, is one of the many who don't know about the SOS of Doooooom. A mortified Charlie mumbles (in the jungle) something about how maybe there could've been other people on the island before them. Jack points out that one of the skeletons is female. Locke gets one of those shots with no eye-light where he looks like Dark Willow and whispers, "Our very own Adam and Eve."
Midsection Beach, Prison Sector. Sun tries to aloe up Jin's raw wrist. In flashback, we see Sun coming through the front door of an apartment carrying a Chanel shopping bag. She has long hair again. She puts the bags down when she sees a large box with a bow on it in the living room; inside the box is a very, very cute and wrinkly puppy that has apparently been sedated, because it just sits in her arms like an adorable sack of flour. Jin comes in from another room and says he got the puppy for her so she'll have company when he's working late. Sun looks downcast and replies, "Remember when all you had to get me was a flower?" Jin's father-in-law calls; as Jin's on the I Gotta Take This plan from Cingular, he answers the call.
Back in the present, Locke offers to stick in the Grotto overnight with Charlie so they can sort through the wreckage. Jack worries about how much time and energy it will take to cart so much water to the castaways every day. He points out the unlimited water supply, cool temperature, and easy-to-protect location of the Grotto and says, so smugly I want to punch him in the mouth, "We don't need to bring the water to the people. We need to bring the people to the water." Boy, Jack could stand to be a lot more humble. In the jungle. He gets up and hoists his pack, adding, "I think we could live here." Kate looks unconvinced.
Midsection Beach. Walt and Jin stare each other down. Mercutio exchanges some angry words with Jin and pulls Walt down the beach. Walt asks what Mercutio meant when he said Koreans don't like black people. Mercutio, to his credit, tries to explain that he doesn't really believe that and just said it because he was angry. "What'd you do to him?" Walt asks, and Mercutio points out that he's spent nearly every waking hour with Walt and hasn't done anything to anybody. "What did your mother say about me?" he asks. Walt says she never talked about him, and his dad points out that Walt doesn't know anything about him. "You don't know anything about me!" Walt protests. "What's my birthday?" "August 24," Mercutio replies. "When's mine?" When Walt looks abashed, Mercutio tells him to forget it.
Sun begs Jin to let her explain to the castaways what happened. Jin asks how they would explain, and adds that he won't explain jack to a thief. Flashback! Sun is sleeping on the couch of their apartment; at least a year has passed, since the dog is now dog-sized. Jin comes through the front door and rushes to the bathroom; Sun follows him in, asking why he won't talk to her. She finds him washing a lot of blood off his hands. "Whose blood is this?" she asks. "What were you doing?" "Working," he snaps. "What do you do for my father?" she demands, and, when he pushes her away, slaps him. A cold-faced Jin says, "I do whatever your father tells me to do. I do it for us." As he goes back to washing his hands, a shocked Sun leaves the bathroom. Goddammit. It isn't good enough to just have a couple who are on the rocks and who survive a plane crash? You have to have one of them be a killer for the Australian-Korean Mafia? Why does every single character need to have some crazy-ass backstory? Some bizarre reason to be on the plane? Not everyone who flies from Sydney to L.A. has to be a killer, or burying their father, or captured by a U.S. Marshal, or whatever the fuck. Some people are just on vacation.
Commercials! Including one for Lil' Smokies Cocktail Weenies. I can't think of a more déclassé food, or one I would rather eat six pounds of right now. If I wasn't still processing 38 grams of sugar.
Jack and Kate lug gallons of water away from the Grotto. Kate bends over to tie her shoe; noticing Jack's gaze, she playfully asks if he's checking her out. "If I was checking you out, you'd know it," Jack says. Actually, I think the only people from whom that statement is necessarily true are blind people. Kate asks what he was thinking then, and he says he was thinking about how they could build a dam around the spring and move the infirmary off the beach. Kate looks crestfallen that Jack wasn't thinking about her ass. "It makes sense," Kate says. "But...?" Jack prompts. "No but," Kate replies. Heh. No butt. That's not what I saw. Jack says that because the castaways are still waiting for a rescue boat to come, "we're gonna have a lot of convincing to do." "'We'?" Kate says. "You still haven't convinced me yet."
Back at the grotto, Charlie wanders into the woods, only to be followed by Locke. Resistant to Charlie's protests that he's just going to the loo, Locke says that the danger in the woods mean he's not going to lose sight of Charlie for a second. "I know who you are," he says. "And I know what you're looking for." Charlie looks nervous, but breaks into a delighted grin when Locke says, "Driveshaft. You played bass." Charlie can't believe Locke's heard of the band, but Locke says that just because he's a geezer with 400 knives doesn't mean he doesn't know music. "I have both your albums," he says, "although I thought that your self-titled debut was a much stronger effort than Oil Change." How delightful that Driveshaft's second album is called Oil Change. Locke asks Charlie how long since he played his guitar, and Charlie replies, "Eight days, eleven hours, give or take." Locke suggests the guitar could have survived the crash, but Charlie says he doesn't think so. He calls the guy at the Oceanic desk who made him check it a "fascist." Locke crouches down before Charlie and tells him he'll see his guitar again. "What makes you say that?" Charlie asks. "Because I have faith," says Locke. Charlie gives the kind of grin one gives when one realized one is stuck camping all night with a Jesus freak.
Sayid's choppin' wood when Kate and Jack return. The purpose of this shot is so that we won't be surprised when that axe shows up later. (According to people who make things up on the boards, many airplanes have hidden axes stored on them. For fires, I guess. This seems insane.) As the three of them sit and drink, Sayid tells Jack that he thinks Sun knows why Jin attacked Mercutio. Jack tells Sayid he wants to move the camp up to the Grotto. Sayid is upset Jack made this decision for everyone, and asks what happened to "live together, die alone." The castaways need to stay on the beach and keep a signal fire burning in hopes of rescue, Sayid says. Jack counters that all those people sitting in the sun far from water is suicide. Sayid stalks away; "I'm not going to admit defeat," he grumbles. In the jungle.
Midsection Beach. Mercutio watches Walt and Victor play, and then sees Jack talking to a few extras about moving to the Grotto. "I already gave you my statement, Sheriff," he says as Sayid approaches. Sayid tells him he came to apologize. "You were the victim in this morning's attack." Mercutio asks why he really came over; Sayid says he wants to take Mercutio's temperature about Jack's Grotto plan. "I got one priority right now, and that's getting my kid off this island," Mercutio responds. "A boat passes, I'm not gonna be on the hook for missing it."
Jack hands a bottle of water to the still-handcuffed Jin and tells him to drink it slowly. He finds Hurley engaging in some telegenic castaway busywork and tells him he's glad he's coming. "I go where the boar's at," says Hurley. "So," he adds, "what up with you and Kate?" Hurley seems excited to be hanging out with the cool kids. "You guys gonna move into a cave together or what?" Jack laughs and asks if he's in high school. Wait! I got it! This entire show, all this danger and death and monsters and adventure, is actually a metaphor for high school! It's Buffy in reverse!
Sawyer approaches Kate, who's sitting on Broody Beach. Two patented Sawyer nicknames and some space-filling banter later, we establish that neither one of them wants to tell the other whether they're heading for the caves or staying on the beach.
Mercutio's chopping wood when Sun approaches him. Before she speaks, we get another flashback to Koreastralia. A short-haired Sun speaks with an interior designer while Jin looks on; they seem to be redecorating their apartment. They move to another room to keep from bothering Jin, who's on the phone. In the bedroom, the designer quietly asks Sun if she's ready and if she has been taking her lessons. Knitting lessons? How nice! I always wanted to learn how to knit. "Do you realize that your husband and your father will do everything they can to find you?" she asks. Huh? I wish some explanation was given for why, exactly, Sun just can't get a divorce like millions of people around the world. Maybe divorce is illegal in Koreastralia. The designer gives Sun an envelope full of what appear to be fake passports and tells her to walk out of the airport at 11:15. This just gets weirder and weirder. Why does she need new ID? Is her father going to kill her? Why? And unfortunately, it doesn't seem weird the way, say, Locke's story seems weird, where we feel it's a glorious mystery that the writers are intentionally leaving open-ended. It seems weird in a way that suggests the writers think we should understand what's going on here, but failed to write these scenes clearly enough to make it apparent. The designer tells Sun that at first her family will believe she has been kidnapped; after a
week or so, she is free to move wherever she wants. Sun repeats the time she is supposed to sneak away: "11:15, 11:15, 11:15."
Sun watches Mercutio chop wood, then steps out of the bamboo grove. "I need to talk to you," she says in English, helped by her apparently fantastic knitting lessons. "You speak English?" a Mercutio asks in disbelief. "Why didn't you say anything?" Sun says that her husband doesn't know she speaks English. "What my husband did to you -- it was a misunderstanding," she says, employing a complicated syntax that no non-native English speaker who just finished English lessons would ever use. She explains that Jin attacked him because the watch Mercutio found two days ago and is wearing now belongs to her father. That raises the interesting question: was Sun's father on the plane? Why else would that watch be there? Sun says, "Protecting that watch is a question of honor." Again, why the tortured syntax? I took five years of French and I could barely construct that sentence en français. In fact, I would never try. I would say, "My husband honors the watch," or something half-assed like that. Sun must've been a hell of a knitting student. Sun says she needs Mercutio's help.
Charlie sneaks away from the Grotto, only to come face to face with Locke at the base of a cliff. Charlie looks impressively bee-stung. Not his lips, though. Just his whole face. "Listen to me, you old git," Charlie says, the closed captioning translating "git" as "geek" again, "I'm going into the jungle." Locke stares impassively. "A man has a right to some privacy!" Charlie adds. "Just give it to me," Locke replies, holding out his hand. He knows that Charlie is running low; if he gives up the drugs now, at least it'll be his choice. Charlie bristles, but Locke pushes on, telling him he can help with the detox. "Do you want your guitar?" Locke asks. Charlie looks like he's ready to cry. "More than you know," he says. Locke tells him that the island may give Charlie what he's looking for. "But you have to give the island something," he adds. We see Charlie's resolve crumble. In the jungle. He hands over the heroin, and Locke says, "Look up." Charlie groans and says, "You're not going to ask me to pray or something." Locke points to the cliff face above them; Charlie's guitar is halfway up the cliff, nestled in some tree branches.
Broody Beach. Jack approaches a sad and pensive Kate, telling her it's almost time to go, but Kate says she can't do it. "I don't want to be Eve," she says. "Someone else can stay here, keep a lookout, wait for rescue," Jack pleads. "Why does it have to be you?" After a silence, Jack asks Kate how she got to be this way. "What did you do?" he asks. "You had your chance to find out," Kate snaps. Her sleeves are rolled way up and reveal, as her tank top did last episode, that she has extremely muscular arms. Hopefully she can keep lifting weights while stuck on an island. Maybe she can find a dumbbell. In the jungle. So why all the emotional wreckage this episode? Why is this such a big deal? Again, there seems to be a lot of information that should have helped us make sense of this scene that simply never appeared on screen. They really tried to cover a lot of island-centric plot this episode; jammed into 44 minutes alongside all the flashbacks to Koreastralia, the compressed plot developments don't quite track. Jack leaves, telling Kate she knows where to find him. "You know where to find me too," she whispers, to no one.
Mercutio menaces a still-handcuffed Jin with the axe. He holds forth on the troubles he's experienced in the last month, which seems a little rich delivered to a guy handcuffed to the landing gear of his crashed airplane, but whatever. He holds up the watch, telling Jin he knows this is the root of their quarrel. "I found this in the wreckage," he says, "and I figured, why let a $20,000 watch go to waste? Which is ridiculous, because time doesn't matter on a damn island!" He tosses the watch into Jin's lap, then swings the axe wildly. But of course he doesn't chop up Jin; instead, he -.-. .... --- .--. ... / - .... . / .... .- -. -.. -.-. ..- ..-. ..-. ... / .. -. / .... .- .-.. ..-., freeing him. "Stay away from me," Mercutio sums up, "and my kid." I sort of wish the Democratic Party would take lessons from Mercutio about staying on message.
Flashback to Sydney Airport. Jin waits in the ticket line as we hear, in the background, Jack giving his speech to Chrissy the Oceanic Airlines agent. So wait: Jin and Sun are going on a trip. Jin is waiting in line at the check-in counter in Sydney. Which means Jin and Sun's trip originates in Sydney. So they don't live in Koreastralia at all; they live in actual Australia. Is the Korean population in Australia so insular that a wealthy Korean society woman can grow up there and never know English until she takes adult lessons? How can I ever answer that question? God, if only there were some organization devoted to disseminating information about Korea and Koreans around the world! I almost buy Jin not knowing English -- at least he has the excuse of not growing up rich. But Sun? I wish I believed that this was an intentional and important plot point, but I don't think it is. I think it just suited the writers' purposes to have a character who pretended she didn't speak English, and they sketched in the backstory without worrying too much about whether it made sense. Arrrgh. Prove me wrong, Lost people. Sun, standing a little ways away from Jin, looks at the clock, which reads 11:15. She takes a few steps away, then stops as tears fall down her cheeks. Outside, her interior designer waits in a car to whisk her away to an impeccably-designed hideout. She looks back at Jin, who, smiling, holds up a white flower. Still crying, she rejoins him in line; when he asks what's wrong, she smells the flower and says, "It's too beautiful." How nice this scene would have been had it not been cluttered up with Korean yakuza baloney!
After the commercial, Charlie sits in the darkened Grotto, playing his guitar. That's a lick from the rare Driveshaft fan-club-only B-side, "That Girl From Pyongyang (Unfurled My Long Wang)." Locke greets the new tenants: Jack, Sun, Jin, two Red Shirts, and Hurley, who complains of the long hike. I'm surprised that Claire and Rose didn't come along with Jack.
Hurley wastes more batteries on an end-of-episode montage, though in this case his music selection can't be faulted: a little of the ol' Red-Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson. Walt asks Mercutio what his birthday is. Aw. I'll be mad if they screw this relationship up with overenthusiastic back-plotting. Sayid watches the fire, sitting to Kate. We don't see Shannon and Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity, but I think they stayed on the beach. It's a shame; now that Shannon's finished her crossword puzzle, perhaps she'd like to solve a Jumble in the jungle. Back at the Grotto, Sun shakes the sand out of a sundress. Charlie strums his guitar. As Willie sings, "But look around you, and take a good look, just between you and me," a hoary shot of sad 'n' pensive Jack fades into a hoary shot of sad 'n' pensive Kate. Willie finishes: "Are you sure that this is where you want to be?"
week on Lost: I'm on vacation in London, so Daniel will be here for your recapping pleasure. Charlie wants his drugs, Sayid gets whacked on the noggin, and a cave-in buries Jack. "Is he alive?" Kate demands to know. "Is he alive?" She's displaying the journalistic doggedness of a young Bryant Gumbel! In -- well, you know.